1. Field of the Description
The present invention relates, in general, to water or boat-based amusement park rides, and, more particularly, to a water ride with a boat capture assembly for tethering or linking a floating vehicle or boat to a track system that is used to move the boat in a body of water in a controlled manner that simulates a conventional boat's movement through the water (e.g., with expected roll, pitch, and yaw as well as up and down movements).
2. Relevant Background
Amusement parks continue to be popular worldwide with hundreds of millions of people visiting the parks each year. In many parks, boat or water rides with floating vehicles are popular with park visitors, especially during hotter seasons. Boat (which may be any type of floating vehicle) rides are typically designed to simulate movement of a floating boat such as a drifting raft or motorized craft. While some rides allow unexpected or almost random movement and location of the boats along a waterway, many water-based rides are configured with show or entertainment features that require better or tighter control of the boat positions. Such control may include an ability to accelerate and decelerate the boat in a predictable manner. The ride designer, though, is also expected to maintain the “feel” of a floating boat throughout the experience including heave, roll, pitch, and yaw movements in response to shifting rider weights or movement of the water.
A common boat ride may include boats that each have guide wheels provided on sides of the boat, e.g., out of sight below the level of the water, to contact sides of a water channel or trough. Additionally, wheels may be provided on the bottoms of the boats to protect the boat against bottoming out in the trough. Each boat is moved forward along the length of the trough by propelling a volume of water down the trough in the desired direction of travel. The trough may be sloped to provide a gravity flow of the water and/or pumps may be provided to move water in flat or less sloped portions of the trough.
Use of flowing water is a proven and simple type of propulsion, but a number of limitations with boat rides have hampered creation of new designs and integration of complex, synchronized show elements within these boat rides. First, the boats are typically limited in their travel such that they only face forward or randomly twirl around in some river raft rides. This characteristic of boat rides creates limitations on controlling passenger sight lines, which can make it difficult to effectively present show elements to the passengers in comparison to dry ride systems where a vehicle can be controlled to face in any direction along a track.
Second, the boats may each travel at differing speeds such as varying within the range of 2 to 4 feet per second. This wide variance in speed may be caused by the boats being loaded differently such as with differing numbers and sizes of passengers. The varying loads results in heavier boats traveling faster than the more lightly loaded boats as the water flow rate varies within a channel (e.g., is faster at a particular depth that may not be reached (or to a lesser amount) by lighter boats). This creates unequal spacing of the boats (e.g., varying boat-to-boat spacing) as the faster boats catch up with the slower boats or leave the slower boats far behind. In high capacity rides, boats are dispatched relatively close together, and the natural variation in boat speeds causes the boats to clump together or spread apart, both results typically being undesired by the ride operators. Testing has shown that equally loaded boats may experience speed variances of up to 3 percent while unequally loaded boats may experience speed variances of up to 9 percent. Boat rides with unpredictable and varying boat speeds (and, hence, unknown positions) have blocked such attractions from having timed or triggered individual show scenes.
Boat rides can be designed to account for varying speed, but these rides have limited appeal to many amusement park operators. For example, varying boat speeds may be accounted for by providing an elaborate and complex method of sorting boats based on their loading (and, hence, expected travel speeds in the flowing water in the trough) upstream of a show scene portion of a ride. Positive methods for sorting boats are typically mechanical, but these mechanical sorting arrangements tend to undesirably interrupt the “free floating” feel and pace of the boat ride.
In some boat rides, a moving cable is provided within the trough, and each boat is tethered to the cable so that it is propelled by being pulled along with the cable instead of by moving water. Such towing cable rides are useful in some applications such as rides limited to a single boat speed, to flat or non-sloped configurations (e.g., to avoid boat collisions on sloped portions), and to a forward-facing boat orientation (i.e., a single passenger sight line) in other cases, a track structure is provided in the water under the boat, and a vehicle or bogie on this track is used to pull or push the boat along the track. The boat is typically linked to or tethered to the track-based vehicle with a relatively complex mechanical linkage, which may be expensive to design and manufacture and may require extensive or regular maintenance or even fail during ride operations.
Hence, there remains a need for improved boat rides for use in amusement parks. Preferably, a boat ride system can be designed that provides adequate control over the speed, position, and, in some cases, orientation of each boat along the ride's travel path while providing a passenger carrying compartment that otherwise behaves or moves similar to a conventional floating craft.